3. Seeing other people cry can easily make you feel like want to cry too 

Uh, no. It takes a lot to get me to cry. I always say I did enough crying as a kid, I’m done with it as an adult.  

Do I actually cry? Well, sure, I can… and it has happened a few times. Most of the time I do pretty well choking it back. A few times, when no one else is around, I just let it go, but even then it doesn’t last long. I will feel the emotion welling up in me if I’m watching certain things that are emotional, but I don’t let that come out as crying. Plus… I’m an ugly crier, and nobody should see that.  

I suppose what this is really getting at is something along the lines of do I feel empathy with other people. Do I feel their pain. Again, not so much. This is an area where I’ve recognized a deficiency for a long time. I don’t tend to feel a lot of sympathy for people. Don’t get me wrong, I like it when others have sympathy for my problems, but I don’t naturally feel much for theirs. Over the years I’ve tried to get better, and I actually have. But even now, I’ll often comment while watching tv shows where a character is paralyzed by some fear or hung up on something that has traumatized them, and I’ll think: what a wuss, get over it. You can’t just lock up. Snap out of it and get done what needs to be done. 

To be fair, I’m kind of like this myself. If I’m going through a rough time, I tend to just think: well, I screwed up and I gotta own it. Get to work and do what you can, the rest will settle itself. 

That said, there are some people that I genuinely feel for in their situations. I’m not heartless, so I’ll hear people’s problems and want to pray for them and offer what comfort I can. I remember one person that I knew suffered from anxiety in social situations. I went out of my way to make sure they felt ok, included. If I saw them standing off, I’d go and ask. With them, I felt a genuine responsibility to make sure that they were ok. I suppose that I’m somewhat of a contradiction then in this area too.  

I’ve also taken in people who are in bad situations because they had no place else to go, so I think that ought to qualify as care and concern for others. I’m only saying this because I made it sound at first like I didn’t really care about other people’s feelings. That’s not really true. I do. I’m sure this is an area where I’ve grown a lot over the years. 

On the surface of it, it’s easy to answer: no I won’t cry because someone else does. But do I feel for others, sometimes deeply, other times not. 

4. You often make a backup plan for your backup plan 

I don’t consider myself a particularly anal type of person. I feel like I’m pretty easy-going. That said, I don’t like going into situations where I think I’ll need a plan, without having a plan. If I have a tough situation coming up, or some situation that could be tricky, I’ll usually try my best to figure ahead what kinds of contingencies I need to be aware of, and then have some plan of attack. I recognize that I can’t ever figure everything out, but at least I don’t want to be caught completely off-guard. I know a line from a movie, even though I’ve never actually seen the movie, where a character wants to commit a murder, so he goes to a criminal he knows and asks his advice. They guy says something along the lines of: When you’re talking about murder, there are about 50 ways this can go wrong. If you’re a genius, you can figure out 25 of ‘em. And you ain’t no genius! 

I’ve used that line many times over the years. The whole point is no matter how smart we try to be, we can’t think of everything. That, however doesn’t stop me from doing my best to try and think of all the contingencies and at least be aware of possibilities. I may not be able to stop, or counter, certain things, but if I do find myself in those situations, I at least want to think- ok, I knew this might happen.  

I don’t plan for everything, though. I do try to have a basic plan on vacations. But if things don’t go according to plan, I don’t get flustered. For example, on the last vacation, the plan was to fly to Norfolk, VA, stay with a family member there, see Jamestown, then head off to Charlottesburg. But the flight got redirected to Washington. Never got to see Norfolk. I was disappointed, but there was nothing to do since I had no intention of trying to drive back into the path of Hurricane Ian in order to see Norfolk.  

With difficult meetings, such as the things that are happening with my sister and niece, I try to think ahead and consider ways they might react so I can be ready. That way I won’t get caught completely by surprise.  

That said, I don’t map out my days. I also consider it an ideal weekend when I don’t have any particular plan. 

5. You usually stay calm even under a lot of pressure 

I don’t know if this is exactly applicable, but I have inadvertently spooked our office manager, Julia, a bunch of times. I wasn’t trying to, but she was focused on her work, I came in, and at the point she noticed me, she jumped. She has tried to return the favor several times by jumping out at me. It just doesn’t work. It’s not that I’m unfazed, but my reaction tends to be to freeze. So to people on the outside, it looks like I’m not reacting, whereas on the inside, I’ve frozen rather than jumped. Then in the second it takes me to get my bearings, I go back to normal. I relate this just to say that in some situations it can look like one thing, but be different on the inside.  

Of course I’d rather have that reaction than flap my arms and scream like a little girl. 

But to the larger question. I hope I stay calm. I don’t tend to look like what people identify as “stressed”, but I will for sure feel it. Particularly in my stomach. The previous question about planning helps me to feel better about difficult situations when I’m in the middle of them because I will have likely already thought through a lot of the ways a scenario could go. I certainly won’t always feel calm. I suppose like everyone else, I’m anxious under pressure too, but I hope that I can at least keep my head.  

When confronted with difficult situations, I think I usually do a pretty good job of staying calm. I’ve had people falsely accuse me of a few things over the years. I will tend to just sit and listen. I’ll maybe ask questions as to why they think that way, or if they’ve made it clear why they think that way, I’ll just sit and take it.  

Years ago, I was (oddly enough) accused of stealing a neighbor’s cat. The lady, who I had seen but never talked to, knocked on my door and asked me to give back her cat. I told her I hadn’t taken her cat, but she persisted. All I could say was I’m sorry, but I really didn’t take your cat. 

More recently I was guilty of something, and after having confessed it, and even turned over all the evidence, I was called in to have it all read back to my face, while the person in authority reimagined what I meant by it and then attributed those motives to me. I just sat and took the berating. It felt more like something he just wanted to get off his chest out of anger at the situation. To be honest, I had actually done something wrong here, and I wasn’t denying that. While it didn’t feel good listening to someone tell me what my own motives were, even though they were wrong, about the worst I could accuse him of was bad judgment. And at that moment, I wasn’t really in a place to accuse anyone else of bad judgment, so I just sat there and took it. I was trembling on the inside, but had decided I wasn’t going to react in any way other than to acknowledge what was said.  

I’m trying to think of some instances where I was under pressure and had to react. 

Maybe the worst was a few years back, I was in a position of authority at a church. Our senior pastor was running late and after the worship finished, I was the one who had to get up and stall. I was supposed to make it look like it was all part of the plan, but because it was thrown on me at the last second, and I’m not the quickest at thinking things through, it was pretty much a disaster. I think I had to get up and just tell everyone what was up, and then try to find things to kill the time… it didn’t go well. 

I’m clearly not the quickest thinker under pressure, but the reality is that I’m just not the quickest thinker, period. Pressure would exacerbate the problem, but it’s not solely a pressure thing. I wish I was someone who could think faster. But I’m not. In fact, one the reasons I write is to process through issues. Every once in a while I run across these guys that just seem to have all the answers. I wish I was like that. Of course some of them are just really good at sounding like they know what they’re talking about, when they really don’t. But others are just much quicker at analyzing a situation and responding correctly.  

So I don’t think I get so much flustered under pressure, but I’m not the quickest thinker either.